Tony Benn was a titan. How small his successors seem

I was surprised to find myself choking up when I heard that Tony Benn had died. It's hardly as if we were friends – though he did give me one of the most useful pieces of advice I've ever had: "Young man, never give yer audience yer sheckond besht shpeech just because you're bored with yer besht one."

Still, I can't shake off the sense that we have lost the last survivor of a Homeric age – an age when elections decided the destinies of nations, when ideologies clashed at the ballot box, when politics was a vocation rather than a career.

Benn saw himself as part of a continuous tradition of indigenous Leftism – a tradition that he traced back through the trade union pioneers, back through the Chartists, back through Wilkes and Paine to the radical movements that emerged from the upheavals of the seventeenth century. He and I shared a fascination with the Levellers. He admired them for their opposition to prelates and princes, for their egalitarianism and for their faith in the common man; I for their libertarianism; both of us for their commitment, remarkable in its time, to a universal franchise.

Democracy was the core of Tony Benn's belief system. Any institution that was not accountable to the people was, in his mind, dictatorial. It was as as a democrat that he opposed the monarchy, crony capitalism, the House of Lords, Nato and the EU ("I can think of no body of men outside the Kremlin who have so much power without a shred of accountability for what they do", was his verdict on Eurocrats).

I am ashamed now to think of the way his opinions were travestied in the 1970s and 1980s, when Right-wing newspapers casually accused him of wanting to turn Britain into some sort of Soviet colony. While he was certainly no Cold Warrior, and while he sometimes overlooked the failings of Leftist regimes, he was repelled by the authoritarianism of the USSR. His socialism was authentically British, rooted in brass bands and the temperance movement and working men's libraries. He never had much time for the bloodthirsty creeds of foreign enthusiasts – except, inexcusably, in the case of Chairman Mao, to whose crimes he was blind.

Don't get me wrong: Benn miscalled most of the major issues of his lifetime. He went to his grave still believing in nationalisation, import substitution and the command economy. Had he been in a position to implement even a tenth of his economic programme, he would have bankrupted the country as thoroughly as – well, as thoroughly as Gordon Brown did.

Yet he died as he lived: a man of granite conviction who, for all the vastness of his self-belief, never lost sight of the fact that he was only one link in a chain, that the doctrines he espoused mattered more than he did. Such men can inspire well beyond their own tribe. It was as a 21-year-old, listening to one of Benn's orations in Trafalgar Square, that I started to ponder how much can be achieved in politics by a man with no prospect of office. How shrunken his successors seem by comparison.